Week of 11/5

 I hope you all had as good a week as we did at school!

Taking advantage of the presidential election, we were able to connect our classroom to current events, as well as have the older kids from the Rainforest Room come join us to present their math project. On Monday and Tuesday, the Rainforest Room presented to the rest of the school their newfound knowledge about elections and the president of the United States of America. They even held a Bridge School election poll, and each student had the chance to cast his or her choice for our next president. In the process, we all got to look at some very fancy graphs, talk about percentages, and learn a bit about sets of data.

We also had a special guest come in: on Wednesday, we had a Darigold dairy farmer and the Dairy Ambassador for Washington State come in and talk all about dairy farms. The discussion also lead to nutrition, food, cows in general, and what happens on a dairy farm.

The Iceberg Snow Leopard Room (which is the given name of where our Kindergarteners and first graders mostly work) was busy this week with projects. It’s exciting to watch the kids hook into a project that reflects their individual interests, and then keep the momentum going for days at a time. During our afternoon family group time, we are winding up our farm-related projects, and will be ready to present in just two short weeks. Some of the kids have stuck with their original ideas, and some have chose to diverge their paths a bit, as new questions or interests came up. Everything will be on display by Thanksgiving, and I can’t wait to see the creative and thorough projects that come from this!

Literacy time has also been a place where students have found engaging projects to work on. Writing plays are a trend for the first graders, and with a just a touch of support and direction, many are on their way to full-scale productions. We continued our phonics work with studying words that end in –at and –ap, or words that contain the phoneme –ng. New sight words we are learning are “come,” “that,” and “are.” Letter and sound recognition are an ongoing theme for many of the younger students, and their activities during center time help to foster these foundational skills.

Our math time (Investigations) has been spent continuing pattern work, as well as collecting data and figuring out how to represent that data. The kids have gotten a brief introduction to Microsoft Excel, as a means to creating graphs digitally. The younger students have also been working on math centers, with a new center to help support recognition of numerical symbols: they have been forming numbers out of playdough.

During the Kindergarten Investigations time, we’ve been having some very interesting mathematical conversation. The concept of infinity has been a popular topic (and believe me, they initiated that one!), as well as the concept of zero. One way to discuss math at home might be to bring up these words, and just see what comes of it. Some of the kids are already formulating some fascinating mathematical theorems!

This week, we’ve also started a new rotation of clubs on Thursday afternoon. The kids have chosen their clubs this time, and we have a cooking club, theater club, sewing club, and Pokemon club.

Finally, thank you to everyone who attended our parent meeting this week. I hope it was helpful and offered some practicable information for inside the classroom. It was great to see everyone in the same room.

Have a wonderful weekend!